Experience Planner

At our recent offsite for the Experience Planning team at Bridge Worldwide, each of us shared what we enjoyed best about our roles. I felt the reasoning provided was very compelling to share, as other professionals in this field could relate. Here’s what I heard:

• I enjoy making complex things easier for the intended users
• I love the moment when you know you’ve found a way to remove frustration away from your end users’ experience
• I enjoy helping to define the solution
• I enjoy solving client and user problems
• We help bring order out of chaos
• We are evolutionary, not revolutionary
• We help drive persuasion by giving people what they need to make a decision

Here are also some comments provided about Bridge:

• There’s something new every day, no monotony
• People’s egos are checked at the door
• Under crazy circumstances, people are still trying to work well together and be nice to each other

And my overall favorite comment was: “Can you imagine a world without Experience Planning”?

I certainly cannot. Experience Planning provides a unique advocacy for the end users, by understanding their cognitive thought process. We help to make the complexity of digital marketing beneficial and compelling to the end user. We match business needs with user needs, leveraging the technology. We enhance the emotional experience, knowing what compels people to act, creating persuasive design. It’s an exciting and rewarding field.

If you’re interested in Experience Planning careers at Bridge, we are currently hiring. Please see our job postings at http://www.bridgeworldwide.com/digital-agency-jobs

Observing a young child being exposed to digital media for the first time is an enlightening opportunity for usability professionals. We get a rare chance to observe someone who has no fear of the technology or of failure, and who is working from raw intuition. Young children possess a rare gift of an open mind, ready for exploration. Through this gift, they can provide a unique insight on how to build user experiences built on human intuition, not predetermined best practices.

Adults who are exposed to new technology or approaches most often bring fears with them, that they will break something, or fail. Adults also have preconceived ideas of how something should work, based on past technical experiences or best practices.

Don’t get me wrong, best practices are certainly useful, as they help people feel at ease and achieve their goals quickly. But it’s also essential to explore new approaches, by being reminded about what’s fundamentally intuitive. And while young children may not be your target audience, there is much to learn from their raw intuition that can be applied to creating new breakthroughs in user experiences.

Help Your End Users Have No Fear

Whether it’s typing an email that doesn’t make much sense, browsing a beloved cartoon character’s web site (and perhaps even playing a game), or snapping away pictures with a digital camera with reckless abandon, children have a passion for learning as much as they can with less understanding of any related consequences. It’s amazing to watch them rapidly learn new technologies simply because they don’t have a fear of what could happen if they go down the wrong path.

That reinforces the value of our profession. As user experience professionals, we strive to make our end users have a great experience, and hopefully chip away at any preconceived fears they have. So as we work on our deliverables, we can think about how to make our target audience forget any of their fears. And we can help transform them to experiencing that sense of wonder and exploration of a child, where small touches can make a big difference in the full experience.

Of course many of us don’t get to work on projects that naturally capture that inner child. But how can we help plan for making the ordinary into extraordinary? How can we educate our team members and project stakeholders on understanding their end user, and collaborating with them to capture that excitement in the end project? These are questions we should all ask ourselves when we start a project, and never stop.

Leverage Intuition to Explore New Opportunities

In this day and age, projects with tight timeframes and budgets occur much more frequently than projects that naturally provide time to sit back and explore our inner child, for new, creative ideas. So instead we often fall back on best practices and what’s been done before.

We can easily fall out of that habit by observing a young child, who is working with almost pure intuition to accomplish his goals online. It takes us back to that basic cognitive thought process, and what is instinctly apparent to end users–so easy a child could do it.

It’s amazing to watch a child who doesn’t know how to read, as she understands what to click on from supporting simplistic visuals and icons. And how the user interface can guide her down an intended path.

You can almost see the wheels in a child’s mind turn as he explores buttons and other functionality without hesitation. It’s also mind opening to hear the child say what he thinks should be possible before he even does it, or what he is looking for if he is stumped. It often makes the most perfect sense.

From this experience, it reminds me to always try to start with a clean slate. Try not to think about how it’s been done before, and put the logo or navigation in a location on your wireframe simply because it’s a best practice. Stop and think about your end users, and what would be fundamentally intuitive to them to explore a new approach.

Of course, the best way to gain this understanding is from user research. Gain an understanding of the target audience’s mindset, how they interact with technology, and what their fears and goals are. Then start creating. Try new approaches that will help users forget their fears, and return to exploring what’s intuitive. And then test your new approaches with users. Refine and test again.

Understanding what’s innately intuitive, first through a child’s eyes and then with your target audience, can help your end users overcome their fears so they can accomplish their goals, find delight through the extraordinary, and find their own inner child.

Too often UIs take the non-engaged user to the next action: they scan the page, don’t see what they want, so they can click on another navigation item or a banner ad callout. A good UI makes this easy to do. But what about the engaged user? The one who read every word of your advice article (or even scanned it), or filled out a contact form and is just given a short “thank you”. What is the next call to action for him?

This takes a little thought. You need to get in the user’s head, and examine each page carefully. If the user wanted to actually read (or scan) this article, what can she do when she scrolls down to the bottom? Are there clear, related calls to action for the natural next step? Or does she have to scroll all the way to the top to see where to go next?

I’ve seen in usability testing time and again where an engaged user will read or scan through the page, and then get to the bottom, and expect to be told what the next relevant step is. He doesn’t want to go back up to the top to find it. He wants it where he already is, which makes perfect sense.

Here’s a web page where we did exactly this.

You’ll see clear, flexible calls to action at the bottom of the page. They’re based on user goals, and what various user paths would be. And we also thought about what relevant items the business would want to promote to the user. Then the calls to action served both.

In usability testing and site metrics, I’ve seen users notice links at the bottom of a page more than they did the identical ones that appeared at the top of the page and above the fold, because the timing was in their favor — they were now ready to take that next step. And they were appreciative of the site guiding them to it.

But don’t just think about content based pages. Think about other instances, such as when a user fills out a contact form. The thank you page often says “Thanks for your feedback. We’ll get back to you in one business day.” But what do you really want the user to do next? If it’s an existing customer, do you want them to fill out a rating & review? Or do you want to tell them about a great new site feature they may not know about? Take them to the next step.

One final note of emphasis: That next step should be based on user needs and goals, and balanced with the business objectives. If you know the user, why she’s coming to the site, and what value she’d extract from the current page, what would be in her mind as a next step? What does the business want to promote that would be of direct relevance to her on this particular page? That’s one way to reach successful engagement.

And don’t make it overwhelming. The recommended next step could be one clear link, or as many as three to provide flexibility. And if technology can make them more personalized and relevant, all the better.

Once you’ve recommended this next step, test it with users. Refine. Work with your team to ensure the calls to action are being fully measured. Once the results are in, refine again.

And always think about what’s next.

At a recent usability testing session, I was getting user reactions to a brand new approach to a favorite online activity. There were clear advantages to the new approach, but users had tunnel vision — they knew what they loved about the way they already do things, and they didn’t even notice it was a new approach until the very end. It was on the home page, and subtly in the messaging throughout, but their preconceived notions were creating tunnel vision, more strongly than I’d seen before.

For the sake of client confidentiality, I am not going to reveal the actual idea. But let’s say as a hypothetical example chocolate lovers were being told about “mocklate.” If you’re not a Friends TV show fan, mocklate is fake chocolate that one of the main characters, Monica, was being asked to make recipes for. Let’s put aside that the episode revealed that mocklate tasted awful, but focus on the fact that chocolate lovers are expecting chocolate–for it to taste like chocolate, have the same texture of chocolate, etc. So you have to make it obvious that mocklate is different and how.

So let’s say I’m building a recipe web site for mocklate, that requires registration (which is a bad idea for a recipe site, but let’s keep pretending). On the home page is the promise of free recipes with mouth watering pictures, as well as a clear message that mocklate is different than chocolate, and what its benefits are.

Chocolate lovers, who don’t know anything about mocklate, are attracted by the beautiful pictures and free recipes and register. They ignored the mocklate messaging and now are in the deeper site experience. They haven’t tasted mocklate yet, and expect the mocklate recipes to use real chocolate. They even assume the listing for “1 cup of mocklate” is just a typo, and use chocolate instead. But if you bake, you know that a recipe substitution often doesn’t work. So the user goes to serve a cake created from a mocklate recipe at a birthday party and it tastes like, well, you know…

While the Web site had a clear message on the home page that this is mocklate, not chocolate, you’re still going to get confused chocolate lovers. The site would better serve them if it hit them over the head, every step of the way, that this is not for chocolate and what the differences are.

We all know as usability professionals to make experiences that are obvious and highly intuitive. But when a user comes in with a preconceived notion of how things work, you have to be clear to the point of almost being obnoxious. Your other team members may say, “How can users not get this?” but they won’t.

And the longer you are on the project, and the more familiar you become with the idea you’re trying to get across, the more biased you become. So always do testing when you have preconceived notions from users that can shadow your priorities of communication.

I’m saying to make it obvious on every page, and with every engagement. When a user is coming in with a preconceived notion, even if your idea is better, you have to let them know every step of the way how it is different. Not just with banner ad callouts they probably won’t even notice. But in the main content of every page, in the captions of your moklate recipe pictures, informational hovers over the mocklate listing in the recipe, and with a clear warning when they go to print or save a recipe of what to expect. And provide obvious ways to receive flexbile and fast support when they have questions and concerns.

By setting up obvious expectations, you may then get a following of users who love mocklate. They see the product benefits and never eat real chocolate again. But it’s because you properly educated them on the differences and benefits every single step of the way, so eventually you broke down those preconceived notions into an idea they clearly understand, and makes their lives better (hopefully).

My inbox was all a buzz today about the new Cuil search engine that launched, masterminded by ex-Google engineers, that, according to reports, boasts a search index that’s three times higher than Google’s. So I spent a little time checking it out.

You can tell right away Cuil looks much prettier than Google. But when you look past the pretty dressing, what do you get?

I was underwhelmed as I looked more closely at my search results. While I see the potential, the design does not lead your eye around the page to understand the hierarchy of the search results. And I missed Google’s “Did you mean … ” feature when I misspelled common search terms on Cuil. And there isn’t an “Advanced Search” feature to be found.

And while Cuil is promoting the quanity of pages they index, they are falling below Google on quality. The search results for some of the brand names I searched on appeared to be relevant, but as I went on to search lesser known terms, I got irrelevant results.

I do really like Cuil’s Explore by Category section to suggest related searches, and the tabs at the top do help narrow your search. These are great features that are easy to use.

As Google said themselves, it’s great to see more competition come into the search space. And I do like that Cuil is more concerned about user privacy. I’m looking forward to the competition pushing the industry to keep getting better.

As professionals in the digital industry, we’ve been on high-speed Internet connections for quite a while, at both home and work. So I found value in a recent CNN article that reminded me there still is significant opportunity for growth. According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project, 55% of Americans have broadband, and 10% have dialup at home. The 35% of Americans who still don’t have access to the internet from home are primarily those with lower incomes and the elderly. 

Since it’s my job to create the best digitial experiences for users who are already online, unfortunately I’ll need to figure out how I can help those who don’t have internet access another day. My immediate concern is ensuring we design and develop sites that those still on dial-up can use.

Small Percentage, Mighty Number

A colleague of mine made a valuable point that when you only look at the people online, 95.7% have broadband and only 4.3% have dial-up, according to a recent MAGNA Global study. But that 4.3% on dial-up still represents 3.2 million Americans. The MAGNA study forecasts that the number on dial-up will continue to fall during the next few years, but according to the Pew study that won’t happen until prices for broadband become more reasonable for lower-income Americans.

In the meantime, 3.2 million Americans is a small percentage, but a mighty number. Let’s not forget about them as we plan our digital experiences. While sites can be optimized for high-speed connections, dial-up users should still be able to access key pages and functionality without the page hanging up or taking an unreasonable amount of time to deliver. What if it’s a checkout page for an e-commerce site? That’s too many customers to ignore. Plus an increasing percentage of users are accessing the same sites from their mobile phones, with even slower connections.

Your Site’s Dial-up Percentage

Of course, your site analytics are the tell-tale factor to determine how many of your site users have broadband vs. dial-up. A site like Wired.com probably won’t optimize for dial-up users as Knitting World would.

And that’s just the U.S. As another colleague of mine pointed out, if your site has global reach, it’s important to look at the broadband vs. dial-up adoption rate in your target countries. Chances are that will bring your broadband percentage down too.

Championing All Connections

I look forward to the day when everyone is on broadband connections from their homes, and I can access the internet while I’m on a plane or riding in a car. And the day when page load times aren’t much of a factor. But until then, I want to be a champion for all users, big connection or small.

Time and again I’ve been in usability testing and focus groups, with very different types of users, and they’ve all asked for the same thing — get rid of the marketing “fluff” and make the approach real.

I’ve seen attorneys, baby boomers, moms and Millennials, with different incomes and interests, all ask for the same thing–images they can relate to and text that tells it to them straight. In fact, I was recently in usability testing where the headline “Looking for Straight Talk” ended up drawing a lot of eyes, even though it was in a low place of prominence on the page, because yes, in fact, they were looking for straight talk.

So how can we make things real? There are a few common elements.

Give More than Pretty Pictures

People like to see themselves in images on a site, which can often be a challenge. That’s why one person in an image usually doesn’t work, because it limits the site’s ability to reach to a diverse audience. Most designers have mastered representing diversity so well that consumers have come to expect this.

But the other part of helping people see themselves is by keeping the models in the picture doing something the user can relate to. Usually this isn’t perfectly posed and smiling models, or a far reaching fantasy of how they’re using the company’s product or service. For example, if a company is selling a beach vacation, a perfect couple smiling for the camera and walking along a private beach doesn’t seem as real as a couple snorkeling with a small group–wearing goggles, big fins and all.

No ‘Marketese’

When marketing a product or service, marketers naturally want to spin the text to make it sound great. But this often means diluting the meaning and leaving the user with nothing but “fluff”. Rather than hearing how great a product or service is, users value how it works and why it works much more.  They’re rather figure out if it’s great themselves.

Here is a comparison with text from two music sites:

From the “About Us” page on MyPlay: “When you shop at store.MyPlay.com, you will not only find your favorite SONY BMG artists and titles but you’ll also have access to special offers such as autographed merchandise from your favorite artists, limited edition gifts with purchase, electronics, video, books and much more. Whether you’re searching for the latest releases, trying to track down an old favorite song, or looking to discover something new, you’ll find the largest collection of SONY BMG titles online right here at store.MyPlay.com.”

From the first page on iTunes: “Shop for music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, podcasts, and games. For Mac + PC.”

Not only does the MyPlay example contain a lot of fluff while the iTunes example gets straight to the point, iTunes also does a much better job of informing users what the site is from the first page of their site, while MyPlay doesn’t even mention what the site is until you dig deeper by finding the “About Us” link in the footer on the site.

Converse with Users

When a customer calls customer service, hopefully he will get a live person (eventually), voice his concern, and get resolution to his problem. But the new customer complaint is often posting a blog, a message board, or a video for all to see.

No matter if the content is posted on the company’s Web site or on a neutral third party site, the worst things a company can do is not be aware of the post, ignore it, or try to discredit it. The best thing is to address it with a straightforward response. Even if it is “Thank you for alerting Company Y to this problem. We’re going to work toward improving this.” can turn a critic into an advocate when the company does improve it.

Another way that companies can discredit themselves is by dismissing public criticism, and not addressing the issues head on. For example, after the recent media scare about BHA in plastic products for babies, I visited several sites. The best treatment was from companies that put a link on their home page, with FAQs and straight information on their sites. The worst treatment was from a company that didn’t address the issue on their site, and when contacted dismissed it because the FDA approves of BHA in plastics.

I’d like to know more, what are other ways marketers can be real for their customers?